# VPRef: A Cross-Domain Benchmark for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16486 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16486/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 24 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [PolyFormer: Referring Image Segmentation as Sequential Polygon Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07387/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11803/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07175/) (2021)
- [Rotated Multi-Scale Interaction Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12470/) (2023)
- [RRSIS: Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08625/) (2023)
- [Cross-City Matters: A Multimodal Remote Sensing Benchmark Dataset for Cross-City Semantic Segmentation using High-Resolution Domain Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16499/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Bidirectional Interaction Model for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08613/) (2024)
- [StandardGAN: Multi-source Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Very High Resolution Satellite Images by Data Standardization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06402/) (2020)
- [LISAT: Language-Instructed Segmentation Assistant for Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02829/) (2025)
- [Intra- and Cross-Scale Feature Interaction Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03583/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rapid advancements in vision-language models have propelled Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) to the forefront of Earth observation. However, practical deployments suffer severe performance degradation under a coupled dual-drift paradigm: visual domain drift from cross-spatial-resolution mismatches and spectral variations, alongside textual logic drift from unconstrained, variable user-input granularities. To mitigate these bottlenecks, this paper establishes the first cross-domain RRSIS benchmark, designated as the Vaihingen-Potsdam Referring (VPRef) dataset, comprising 46,972 language-image-annotation triplets organized into a three-tier linguistic hierarchy. Building upon this benchmark, we develop a tailored parameter-efficient domain adaptation baseline anchored on the Segment Anything Model (SAM3) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our framework counteracts visual distribution discrepancies through pseudo-label-driven self-training and addresses textual logic drift via random multi-granularity text prompt mixing. Crucially, the distribution of empirical metrics across ablative variants suggests a potential decoupling between cross-modal semantic robustification and visual domain alignment, demonstrating that linguistic variance drives fine-grained semantic invariance while pseudo-label propagation governs macro-scale spatial grid alignment. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate the proposed framework achieves superior cross-domain segmentation boundaries while modifying merely 1.08% of the foundational parameter footprint, establishing a robust baseline for future multi-modal remote sensing domain adaptation research. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/quanweiliu/VPRef.